As Various as Their Land The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans

Stephanie Grauman Wolf

In 1700, ten sparsely settled colonies clung precariously to the
Atlantic coast of the vast American continent, each far more firmly
attached to the Old World by ties of politics, economy, and culture
than they were to each other. By 1800, sixteen states, united by
a common government, were poised exploit the seemingly endless
resources of a new and independent nation. Throughout this century
of enormous changes and challenges, one factor had remained constant:
no single description captured the majority of the new country's
inhabitants; no one lifestyle was embraced by a "typical American."

Rich or poor, urban or rural, male or female, young or old, native-born
or immigrant, northerner or southerner, slave or free, white or
of colorthe mixture of these characteristics and a host of
others within each individual determined the shape and opportunities
of everyday life. Americans of the eighteenth century were in the
end, as they had been in the beginning, as "various as their land."

"Well researched . . . this study deals with an extraordinary
variety of people in equally manifold circumstances: urban and
rural dwellers, laborers and owners, slaves, impoverished immigrants,
and Amerindians."

Stephanie Grauman Wolf is a senior research fellow
at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
She is the author of Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family
Structure in Germantown, PA, 16831800s (1980, Princeton University
Press).